Chapter 3
Nimali announced the arrival of the bora: the winter wind.
The sky seemed to harden into a gray mass like porridge left on the counter, and we hardly ever saw the sun.
One day, I found Vinsanda and Ghazel dragging enormous iron frames of plate glass across the courtyard and was informed they would be fitted to the Baronessa’s balcony and to the eating porch, which would become an “ARA NERA!” as Ghazel put it.
That is to say, a black parrot. I understood immediately he meant an aranciera—an orangery for the single orange tree.
What it in fact became was a sleeping porch for Cesare.
The kittens I had seen on my first day were growing into cats, and took over the garage.
The Baronessa’s balcony placed one more pane of glass between her and the world.
The air was full of the scent of burning leaves, and every night at dinner, Vinsanda prepared a fire that took only a single match to set ablaze.
I was often made to sit near this inferno, and a Tonino jacket received a scorch mark, which the Baronessa found very fashionable.
And yet her energy did not cease. How she was not exhausted I do not know; from the first “Koo-koo!” midmorning to the final evening brush-off (“Perhaps we’ve seen enough of each other today”), there was not a moment when one could rest. There was the garden to visit, which we did even in deepest chill, supervising the rows of dormant plants like teachers walking between test-taking students; there were various fantasies to entertain, such as restoring the captain’s cabin’s fireplace, which, when lit, leaked smoke into my bedroom; there was the hair salon to visit; there were seasonal clothes to be brought out, brushed of mothballs or unwrapped from tissue, all the while brushing mothballs from her old stories and unwrapping her peculiar thoughts from the tattered tissue of her discretion (“Estelle will grow even more beautiful as time passes, don’t you think?
” then with a donkey’s laugh: “NOT ME!”); and of course her letters, which she dictated to me not from across the room but sitting close beside me on her salon sofa, peering at my calligraphy and spelling—for the letters were often in Italian, and as our alphabetical pronunciations were noncorresponding (“Chee ahkkah eepsilon eeloongah, you have written something very amusing, but we will have to start over”), the process was so slow it seemed as if I were not inking the words onto the page but embroidering them.
And there was, of course, my catalog. I was making progress, having conquered now the kitchen, the white bedchamber, and the living room.
My employer insisted on what she called a “longhand ledger,” which I am sure was an invention of her imagination.
I used her computer in the mornings for the sake of speed and efficiency, and after lunch, I transcribed everything on a yellow legal pad, to her apparent approval.
Thus I spent the final month of my time at Villa Coco.
After the first snow, I accepted an invitation to dinner from Estelle.
It was on a Sunday, when the Baronessa often preferred to eat alone and was happy for me to find my own amusement.
Estelle had walked to Villa Coco that day (though I had not seen her; again she was involved in some mysterious closed-door conversation with my employer), so she accompanied me back to her place.
I remember the frozen ruts of mud on the road that led to her cottage and the extraordinary sighting of a bird—all-over celeste, underwings a deeper blue—hopping from branch to branch above us, surely a migratory vagabond.
Estelle nodded to it as we walked. She wore a green jacket and, on her wrists, a set of amber bangles that clattered with her gestures. She asked me about Giacomo.
I shrugged. “You know? When I came here I promised myself, no affairs!”
She laughed. “Hard when Coco is around! She always loves somebody having an affair.”
“I suspect,” I said, “that she pushed the two of us together.”
“She wants her cousin to be happy.”
“And the Number One?”
She put her hands up. “What wine does I am not to blame!”
Calling Giacomo in for the trip to Ferrara and for the olive harvest—had the Baronessa done it to entertain her cousin or myself or both? Or was it to distract us? “But, Estelle, it’s just a story, as you all call it. After all, I’m leaving in a month.”
“Now that you have had a story, she may want you to herself. And what happens after a month? What do you want to happen?”
The bird reappeared above us, turning its beak back and forth. I did not know.
“Do you have a story…?” I asked.
I let the ellipsis float there like a pontoon bridge she might take to complete the crossing. She paused, as one might before a pontoon bridge, then gave a wry smile and a shrug.
“Who would I have? Duccio? No, they’re all as rough as wild boars and talk like they’re coughing something up.
” She imitated the peculiar Tuscan country accent, where c’s are replaced by hacking coughs.
“Either that or aristocrats who have handmade shirts and shoes but not a lira for anything else. No, I’m fine by myself out here, thank you.
I make a little money arranging things for people, Coco included.
And soon I may be leaving too—” She stopped herself with a smile and rubbed her hands together in the cold.
I was startled. Estelle seemed as much a part of Villa Coco as the signora at the crossroads. “You’re leaving?”
She strode ahead of me, stumbling slightly on the icy path. “I may have an opportunity.”
“But you’d be leaving…” I wanted to say the Baronessa, but in truth I could not say what duty they had to each other.
“I haven’t said yes. It’s maybe a terrible mistake, but we will see.”
It made me somehow sad, the thought of Estelle gone from the place.
Everything seemed to be sliding away like the hillside after a storm.
Giacomo and Estelle gone. The odd sensation that the house was dwindling.
As if some enchantment had reached its limit.
I stopped at the spot where the path rose up to her cottage, now visible among the trees.
The bird stretched its wings before it. “Estelle, I wanted to ask about Oscar.”
I thought I saw her head jerk slightly in surprise. I went on: “His visits. His packages.”
“Oh, that?” She smiled as if I’d asked a foolish question. “Don’t worry about that.”
“And the Baronessa seems…She has an urgency that wasn’t there before. I don’t understand.”
“Old people, there is a certain impatience, no? Not hard to understand.”
And off the bird flew into the gray sky; I hope it was headed somewhere warm, one who had lost its way home.
We had rabbit in white wine and rosemary and talked of foolish things around Villa Coco: Ghazel’s son, who it seemed was a math genius, and Vinsanda’s heretofore unknown mastery at cake decorating.
I could not, however, learn anything more about Oscar or my employer.
It was only later, when stumbling (a little tipsy) through the darkness from our villa’s kitchen to my bedroom, that I nearly ran into something in the entrance hall and, steadying myself against it, pricked a finger on a sharp edge.
A bit of moonlight was in the room, and I could see the object shining a dull gold—the sculpture in bronze of the boat.
I had passed it daily in my cataloging but had paid it little mind.
Now I touched its nameplate, and though I could not see it (how had I not noticed before?), I could feel each letter as it passed beneath my fingertip: C-A-P-R-I-C…
Giacomo began to call me at the house, so much so that even Nimali, answering the kitchen phone, became a mother handing the receiver to her teenager, one eyebrow dramatically lifted in semaphore for “Again?” Our calls would periodically be interrupted by a clicking sound, a sigh, then another click, which I finally realized was the Baronessa because, eventually, she cut in on our conversation and called for “an intermission so the audience can take refreshment.” She proclaimed to her cousin he could call only once a week.
“On giovedì.” Of course, since I had only a handful of weeks left, we ignored this directive.
“Let’s meet in Florence,” Giacomo said on our next call. “Sunday!”
“Oh! I’d love that!” I said.
“Vabon. We can have a hotel bed instead of that horsehair mattress.”
I heard the telltale click.
“Um,” I said, “I will have to check with your cousin, but as Sunday is my day off—”
Of course my employer could not resist breaking in: “Eh? What is happening Sunday?”
Giacomo ahemed and said, “We were thinking of Firenze.”
“Oh no,” she said. “Impossible. There is so much to do before our friend leaves.”
“But, cousin, it’s Sunday.”
There was a silence on her end of the phone.
“Baronessa?” I said.
“Impossible,” she repeated, but this time her voice was somehow quieter, weaker.
“Let us think of another time.” She reiterated that it was impossible, quite impossible.
What was impossible, I began to think, was my stubborn employer.
I did not then understand that her motive was never to separate us; she was not thinking of us.
There were other worries that had nothing to do with a cousin and a callow American.